


Words Swallowed by Water

by Anna__S



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-18 10:20:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2344847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna__S/pseuds/Anna__S
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These were the only stories he could bear to tell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Words Swallowed by Water

**Author's Note:**

> On my hard drive this was titled Oliver Queen and his many women. So, make of that what you will. This is set in Season Two between Blind Spot and Tremors. With thanks to V. for keeping me from going too far afield.

 

 

_“They made me wear make-up,” he muttered unhappily to his mother.  The thick layer of powder felt heavy and uncomfortable on his skin. He imagined Felicity, smirking and telling him he should be used to it by now._

_A staff member placed him in a plush chair, across from Tiffany, no, Wendy something, who raised one perfectly manicured eyebrow at him._

_“You know what to expect right?” she asked as she crossed and uncrossed her legs. He nodded._

_"We’ll start with the easy questions,” she said, touching his hand lightly._

_He wasn’t always the best at understanding women, but he knew how to read body language, and she was giving him all her best fuck-me cues. Oliver pictured her long fingernails, sharpened and apple red, raking into his back. He shook off the image._

_She turned to the camera, flashing her perfectly white teeth.  “Tonight, a Starling News Exclusive.  Last year, the world was astonished when Oliver Queen was found alive, having spent five years alone on a remote island._ _Now, for the first time, Oliver is here with me, to tell his story.”_

_Wendy turned back towards him, her smile somehow widening even further. “Oliver, thank you so much for being here.”_

_"It’s my pleasure,” he said smoothly._

_“First, I want to ask: why now, why after all this time, have you chosen to share the details of your ordeal?”_

_He remembered to pause, and close his eyes, to take a slow breath like he still wasn’t quite ready._

* * *

Oliver and Thea joined their mother’s first strategy meeting more out of a sense of loyalty rather than any real interest. He listened, absently, to the pollsters and advisors and media consultants discuss, in equally frantic tones, her position on abortion (undecided) and the color of her yard signs (blue). He doodled a small arrow onto his notepad and wondered if Felicity had successfully tracked down that shipment of grenade launchers.

He looked up just in time to hear his name.

“What?” he asked.  

The frizzy-haired consultant frowned at him. “I was saying that your mother would really benefit from some positive pre-announcement publicity. I think if you did the talk show rounds, or maybe even just one sit-down with one of the big local names it would go a long way towards humanizing your mother.”

“A sit-down on what?” he asked, feeling as if he’d missed something important. 

He wished he’d thought to bring Felicity, so she could slide her notes in front of him or kick him when somebody said his name.  

His mother turned her chair towards him and placed her hand on his shoulder, which he recognized as a Very Bad Sign. “Oliver, they want you to talk about your time on the island. But I’ve told them I’m not going to ask you to do that unless you feel ready.”

He pushed back from the table, as if he’d been touched with a live wire. “Absolutely not.”

"C'mon Ollie," said Thea in her familiar pleading tone, like they were fifteen again, and she all she wanted was for him to stop acting out and picking fights at the dinner table.   _"_ It would probably be good to talk about it. Therapeutic."

"We can have pre-scripted answers, pre-written questions. No surprises. You can tell them whatever you want," said the PR specialist.  “It doesn’t have to be the truth.”

"It doesn't seem very subtle."  He paced the length of the table and wished the room were bigger. His face was warm, his neck prickling where his collar met his skin.

"Oliver, politics is not a subtle business," his Mother said.

“Even if you don’t want to do it, just think about how huge this would be for Mom,” Thea said.  “I’m not going to let this go,” she added.

“My answer is no,” he said. 

 But Thea wasn’t lying. The next day, she cornered him at Verdant and jabbed her finger into his chest.  

"You don’t have to talk to the world, if you really don’t want to,” she said, “but I wish you would talk to me.” When he didn’t respond right away, she continued, her finger still digging into his ribcage, just on the edge of a swollen deep-purple bruise. 

“I know you think I’m the same fragile kid I was when you left, but you’re not the same person you were. And neither am I.”

“I know you’ve had to do a lot of growing up, Thea,” he said, capturing her hand in his. 

And he did know, but it was hard to remember all the time. He was constantly catching himself assuming she was the same girl he’d described to Shado: bambi-eyed, gangly, always bruised because she couldn’t remember where her limbs ended and where they began. Sweet to a fault. Bossy. An excellent pincher. 

He owed her something.  And since he couldn’t tell her the truth, he decided the next best thing was a fiction that she could recognize, that she could understand. A story he could bear to tell. 

“Fine,” he said, taking a long, exasperated breath. “I’ll do it."  

 

* * *

_“What’s the hardest part of being back home?”_

_“Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes it feels like I never left. Like this is all a dream and when I wake up, I’m going to be back there." It was a cliche, but Felicity had promised him that it was a good cliche, that it would ring true._

* * *

 

That night, it was his father he dreamed of. 

The boat slick with fluids and brains, cooking in the hot sun, the rotting smell so thick in the air he could feel it on his tongue. His hands were crusted with blood and salt and it took him three tries to finally drag his father’s body off the boat onto the island. He would never have imagined a body would be so heavy, so unyielding.

But this time, he fell over with his father into the dark churning water, he fell and he was so heavy, his legs were frozen. The ocean was swallowing him down, down, down –

_Wake up._

His father died to wake him up. Maybe it was time

_Oliver, wake up, you’re dreaming._

He opened his eyes, sitting up with a violent start, grasping for the bow propped up against his cot. He could feel his heart thumping against his chest.  Oliver inhaled sharply and tasted copper, allowed the familiar bitter tang to clear his head.  

Sara was kneeling next to him on the thin pallet, her hands near him, but not on him.  She knew better than to touch him while he slept. He appreciated that about her. He didn’t have to explain why he slept with his back to the wall or why he kept a knife in a slit carved into his mattress. 

“What do you dream about, when you wake up like this?” Sara asked. “I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours,” she added, placing her warm hands on his arms.

“Lian Yu,” he said shortly. 

He was quiet for long enough that she started to move away from him.  “The people I’ve failed. Shado. Tommy. Slade. My father. You.”

Her eyebrows pinched together. “I’m here, Ollie, you didn’t fail me.”

“You saved me,” she said.

He shook his head.  Everybody died for him, and he didn’t know why.  It was just a matter of time. 

 

* * *

_“Now, we all know you had a bit of reputation back in the day,” she said – smiling at him sweetly, as if this hadn’t been on the list of forbidden topics._

_“I don’t know about that,” said Oliver as he shifted in his seat, trying to keep his lips from twitching into a frown._

* * *

 

Two weeks into the boat trip, on a warm, gusty day, Sara spit out the question he had felt her edging around since she stepped onto the dock for the first time. 

"Why did you invite me?" she asked. 

He was changing from his bathing suit into his robe, although he didn’t know why he bothered, since everything had taken on the same clammy, salty feel. He paused, one arm still in the robe, and returned to the bed.

"I like you," he said, putting on his best adore-me smile, as he reached for her.  

Sara didn't pull away, but she didn't lean into him either.  She tilted her head, her voice husky and low.  

"But why me? Let's be honest, Ollie, you like a lot of girls.   You could have snapped your fingers and brought anybody in Starling City.  Why did you pick your girlfriend's sister?"  

He rolled onto his side, pushing up her t-shirt to expose a swath of freckled skin.  "I thought we weren't going to talk about Laurel," he said.  

"I never agreed to that."

"It was unspoken," he said.

"Yeah, well, you can’t bind me to an agreement I never made. You know what I think?" she asked.

He shook his head, focusing instead on making small circles on the soft plane of her stomach.  He moved his head down to kiss the sensitive spot next to her hipbone, but she gently pulled his head back, forcing him to look at her.  

"I think you wanted to do something that she couldn't possibly forgive you for. Even the benevolent Laurel could never take you back after you spent a month screwing her sister."  

At  _screwing_  her mouth twisted in distaste.    

He stared back at her for a beat, before leaning down again, pushing her shirt back up, laying a kiss on her shoulder, and down between her breasts.  Her bathing suit was still damp, and her skin tasted like the sea.

"I like you," he repeated and this time she closed her eyes, and let him pull her shirt the rest of the way up. 

Later, Oliver decided that her conclusion wasn't entirely fair.  He did like Sara. He liked her long legs and how she was the first one to swan dive off the boat; that he didn't have to tease and cajole her into it. He'd always felt like they were part of the same team. Laurel talked about them the same way, used a similar don't-make-me-come-over-there-and-fix-you voice on both of them. Team fuck-up.  

 

* * *

 

_In between commercial breaks, an assistant scurried onto the set and sprayed something on Wendy’s hair that filled the set with a chemical odor that made his nose itch. He tried to surreptitiously scratch his nostril but Wendy gave him a withering look that sent his hands flying back into his lap._

_“What was the hardest part of your time there?”  she asked, a thin veneer of irritation in her voice now._

_He slumped his shoulders. Wendy tilted her head towards him expectantly._

_“The loneliness,” he admitted, allowing a hint of vulnerability into his voice. “It was unbearable, at times. I used to stay up at night and watch the stars, because at least I could pretend that the people I loved were doing the same thing. That maybe we were still sharing something.”_

_He offered her Felicity’s words as his own, and he thought they might have even been true._

* * *

He slept in naps, fitfully.  He would count rocks and stars and trees, anything he could see. Anything to put an end to the chorus running through his head:  _I’m never getting off this island._

On some nights, Shado would lie awake next to him, her chin resting on her hands. He knew it was an act of kindness, that she could have fallen asleep on command. Her body was a more perfect machine than his.  

During those nights, she told him about her childhood. Taught him Mandarin. Described how to build the perfectly balanced bow.  

It occurred to him at times that she had given him everything that would keep him alive, and in return, he wasn’t sure what she was getting out of it. It was the first time he’d never had to wonder if somebody loved him for his money, and he liked it less than he thought he would.

Oliver tried to make up for this debt by loving better than he had in the past: more generously, more thoughtfully.

He wanted to frame his life in a way that wouldn’t spark disdain in her, but it wasn’t so easy.  He could barely remember what Queen Consolidated actually did, and he was confident that his record-breaking run on the Sentinel’s Most Eligible Bachelors list wouldn’t impress her.

The catalogue of things he was proud of was short. He’d been a terrible boyfriend and occasionally a good son, but he knew he was a good brother, so in the beginning, he told her endless tales of Thea and Tommy. He’d left out the nights spent at the club, Tommy blessing their deep pockets and what he called the Queen-magnetism.

But Shado occasionally caught him gazing at his photo of Laurel, now stained yellow with dirt, like everything else he owned.

“You still love her,” she said in a matter of fact tone, one night. 

He ducked his head, rather than say yes. She placed her strong, small hand in his.

“It’s okay,” she said. “We can care about more than one person at a time. That doesn’t make you selfish or cruel.”   

Oliver didn’t know how to tell her that it wasn’t this betrayal he was worried about. It was Sara. It was the girls in the bars, who always knew exactly who he was, who sauntered up to him, while Laurel was home studying. It was that red headed girl with the killer ass he fucked in a car parked outside his apartment, while she slept inside.

And for some reason, these betrayals seemed to sharpen and deepen with time.  As if he had chosen to stay on the boat. When he had considered the future, he’d always had the vague thought that he would come home and make things right; fit himself into that vision she had of their shared life.   

What he had loved about Laurel was that she was exactly the kind of girl who nobody expected to fall for his charm. Or his bullshit, which is what her parents would’ve said. Long before she was a lawyer, Laurel loved  _rules_ and Oliver loved proving that rules didn’t apply to him. Laurel choosing him seemed like proof that he was greater than the sum of his parts. 

He didn’t know why he had to push so hard against that. Why he was always trying to prove her wrong. 

And he’d never considered that he wouldn’t have an infinite supply of third and fourth chances.

So he told Shado about Laurel, lovingly, in great detail. Like his words were a message sent into the sea and they might wash up at her feet.  And she would know that he was sorry. That she had been right all along; that somewhere inside of him was a better man.   

 

* * *

 

_She nodded at him knowingly, the picture of compassion.  As if she too had once lived alone on a deserted island, without assistants or bottled water._

_"So, looking at yourself now, do you think you’re different? Has the island made you a changed man? ”_

_"Not as different as you’d think,” he said, offering up a cocky grin._

 

* * *

 

Felicity placed two chairs down next to each other and turned up the heat to mimic the hot lights of a television studio. She sat in the chair on the left, her legs dangling down, not quite reaching the floor.

After delivering a description of loneliness that was somehow perfect, meaningless and yet personal, she kicked him and told him it was his turn. He stuttered through something that was only a shadow of her smooth answer.

"How are you so good at this?" he asked.

The when half the time you can't even say what you mean went unsaid, but Felicity knew exactly what he meant and started to look offended, then rolled her eyes and smiled at him, "It's just playing a part. Like being in a play." She shrugged. "I don't have to get all caught up in the wild and weird jungle that is my brain."

She nudged him slightly with her shoulder. "If you thought I would be so terrible at this, why did you ask me for help? I'm sure you can afford to hire professionals."

It was his turn to shrug. "You know the truth. I thought it would be less awkward this way."

She snorted. He liked how her whole face rumpled, how completely undignified it was.

"I don't know anything about your time there! And every time I learn something about it, I realize I know even less than I thought I did." She made the face she made when sentences got away from her, but didn’t slow down, "like, what did you eat on the island? Where did you sleep? Did you ever get to wash your hair?"

"These are the things you think about?" he said, raising his eyebrow slightly.

She took a quick sip of her beer, leaving behind a faint pink half-moon on the bottle's lip."Of course. And you should talk about that stuff," she added, like a light bulb had gone off in her head. "People will love it. Tell them about how you learned how to break into coconuts."

"I didn't drink out of coconuts, Felicity. It wasn't spring break,” he said, slightly exasperated.

"But they don't know that! Play up the whole poor little rich kid, billionaire out of water element. Everybody loves that."

He tried. He described eating alien leaves and nuts, learning how to catch the indigenous birds; trying to weave in some truths, for Felicity and Thea, if nobody else.

"What was the first thing you ate when you got home?" Felicity asked in what she’d earlier described as her best Katie Couric, circa Sarah Palin interview, voice.

"Uhh," he said. "Help me out?"

"You can't just tell the truth?"

"I honestly don't remember," he said.

"I would've gone straight to a diner and gotten a grilled cheese, french fries and a milkshake. Or a burger? Both," she decided after a thoughtful pause, closing her eyes as if she could taste the burger, a dreamy smile on her face, the tip of her tongue poking out between her lips. "Or I would've gone straight to a grocery store and just sat there for hours."

He smiled and she cocked her head at him, like a puppy. "Oliver, have you ever even been to a grocery store?"

"Yes," he said, but it came out like a question mark. "I must have?"

"Your life is so weird. Definitely do not share that piece of information," she said.

He tried again, describing his first home-cooked meal – steak of course, because his mother knew that it was always his favorite – back in civilization. He left out that their personal chef had done the cooking, and that he stormed out of the room halfway through dinner.

"How was that?" he asked.

"You're a little stiff," she said. "But you usually are – I mean not, you know. Not that kind of stiff,” she said, a flush spreading from her neck up her face.

"I wasn't always like this," he said, almost ruefully.

"I wish I'd known you then," she said, a small smile playing on her lips.

"No you don't," he said. "I wasn't worth knowing back then."

"Thea, my Mother, Laurel…Tommy" he paused briefly, feeling the familiar constriction in his throat, "they all think they know me because they knew me before. And they're wrong. They have no idea who I am."

He liked that Felicity and Dig didn't have superimposed expectations that he was meeting or failing to meet. Somehow, when he wasn’t trying to remember who he had been, it was easier to remember who he was: that slice of a person left at the core, where the masks overlapped, neither half-hearted playboy nor half-baked hero.

He realized he was staring at her. Her mouth was opened slightly, her bright eyes shining at him, equal parts hope and alarm tangled there. He looked away, something tightening in his stomach.

"Why don't we try that one more time?" she suggested, taking another pull from her beer.

“What was the question again?” he asked and she groaned.  

 

* * *

 

_He kept his eye on the clock, noting that his time was almost, finally up. As unlikely as it seemed, he might actually get through this._

_Her face arranged into a mask of sympathy, she asked him what he thought allowed him to make it through this ordeal._

_Oliver knew what he was supposed to say. He was supposed to tell her about the power of his love for his mother and his sister. That they were stronger than the island. That they gave him the will to survive, to push through each long, grueling day._

_"I realized something…" he said, and he paused._

_Wendy leaned in, as if she recognized that she was about to get something unscripted; something true._

_"I realized that I was worth saving," he said._ _  
_

_Wendy sat back, trying to hide her disappointment._ _He looked past her, past the monitors, and the strangers and the cameras, and saw his mother staring back at him, sad and proud._

 

 

 

 


End file.
